Privatisation and Stock Market Efficiency: The British Experience

We present evidence that with its emphasis on wide-share-ownership the British privatisation program created heavy involvement of small investors in privatised stocks. Using standard market efficiency tests and maximum likelihood estimates of stationary fractional ARIMA models, we show that the pricing of privatised stocks in the London Stock Exchange was indeed inefficient, unlike the rest of the market. Together, these two pieces of evidence suggest that small investors, behaving like noise-traders, may be generating this inefficiency. Yet, we cannot rule out alternative explanations.     

Analysis of Visitor Decision Making System When Visiting Natural Recreation Sites by Multinomial Logit Model

Multinomial Logit Model has analyzed the relationship between the frequency of visits to recreation areas and the motivational factors affecting the visits. Kastro Environment Preserving Site that is located in the Black Sea coast of Marmara region in Turkey, has been chosen as the site for this study. Kastro bay is a natural park that is visited only for recreational visits. The study has been conducted on a photogenic study group due to the proximity factor of Kastro bay close to Istanbul. Kastro bay is a popular recreational park due to its characteristic advantages such as a 200 m wide and approximately 2.5 km long beach and with its high quality vegetation. The vegetation type includes ash tree, oak tree, black pine, sand lily etc. Kastro bay is also the site for the Mediterranean seals (Monachus-monachus) which are at the level of extinction. Approximately 50,000 visitors visit the region during the months of July and August. It has been concluded that there is high direct correlation between the frequency of visits and the motivational factors. It has been determined that the visits are mostly based on the sea and the ecological tourism.Jel: O13, Q20, Q26, Q51, Q56, Q57     

Environmental policies,national culture,and stock price crash risk: Evidence from renewable energy firms

This study investigates the impact of country‐level environmental performance and national culture on the stock price crash risk of renewable energy firms. Employing a large sample of 626 renewable energy firms across 31 countries, we find a significant nonlinear relationship between country‐level environmental performance and crash risk. National culture dimensions are found to strongly predict the crash risk of renewable energy firms, particularly after the global financial crisis. On the contrary, national culture dimensions and environmental policies are observed to not exert any significance in explaining the crash risk of fossil fuel firms. Our results are robust with respect to alternative measures of stock price crash risk and the endogeneity of national culture dimensions. Overall, the findings of this paper contribute to the environmental economics literature by providing new evidence regarding the role of societal and environmental factors in explaining the stock price crash risk of energy firms.     

Income distribution, efficiency and rationing

This paper studies the impacts of income distribution on the efficiency of trade mechanism and rationing of agents who are priced out of trade in a dynamic search model with two-sided asymmetric information. Buyers and sellers have asymmetric information about valuations and incomes respectively. In such a frictional environment, the effects of several variants of changes in income distribution on efficiency of trading mechanism and the population of rationed buyers and sellers are elaborated.     

Deforestation, corruption, and private ownership in the forest sector

One of the remedies launched in combating corruption in the forest sector is privatization of state forests (and private forest ownership). We hypothesized that privatization could reduce deforestation through reducing corruption. We found a statistically significant strong positive relation between corruption and deforestation for the period between 1995 and 2008 by using two different corruption indices and panel data, a highly statistically significant negative correlation between private forest ownership and corruption across countries by using univariate and multivariate models for three different corruption indices, and a highly statistically significant negative correlation between private forest ownership and deforestation across countries by using univariate and multivariate models.     

Salesperson cooperation: The influence of relational, task, organizational, and personal factors

Salesperson cooperation has become a crucial issue for the overall performance of most sales organizations. The authors examine the antecedents of task-specific, cooperative behaviors of salespersons toward other salespeople working in the same organization. The main theses of the study are that (1) the four major antecedent categories of factors—relational, task, organizational, and personal— constitute, collectively, the primary determinants of salesperson cooperation and (2) each antecedent category exerts, independently, significant influence on the cooperative behaviors of salespersons. The results support the main theses and provide useful insights for sales managers attempting to foster cooperation among salespeople. The relative impact of each antecedent category, as well as the effects of specific variables within each, is discussed. Cengiz Yilmaz is an assistant professor of marketing at Gebze Institute of Technology, Turkey. He obtained his Ph.D. in marketing from Texas Tech University in 1999. His research interests focus on sales management, distribution channels and relationship marketing, and strategic issues concerning intra- and interfirm aspects in marketing systems and their links with business performance. His research has been published in various conference proceedings. Shelby D. Hunt is the J. B. Hoskins and P. W. Horn Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. A past editor of theJournal of Marketing (1985–1987), he is the author ofModern Marketing Theory: Critical Issues in the Philosophy of Marketing Science (South-Western, 1991) andA General Theory of Competition: Resources, Competences, Productivity, Economic Growth (Sage Publications, 2000). He has written numerous articles on competitive theory, macromarketing, ethics, channels of distribution, philosophy of science, and marketing theory. Three of hisJournal of Marketing articles, “The Nature and Scope of Marketing” (1976), “General Theories and Fundamental Explananda of Marketing” (1983), and “The Comparative Advantage Theory of Competition” (1995) (with Robert M. Morgan) won the Harold H. Maynard Award for the “best article on marketing theory.” His 1985Journal of Business Research article with Lawrence B. Chonko, “Ethics and Marketing Management,” received the 2000 Elsevier Science Exceptional Quality and High Scholarly Impact Award. His 1989 article, “Reification and Realism in Marketing: In Defense of Reason,” won theJournal of Macromarketing Charles C. Slater Award. For his contributions to theory and science in marketing, he received the 1986 Paul D. Converse Award from the American Marketing Association, the 1987 Outstanding Marketing Educator Award from the Academy of Marketing Science, and the 1992 American Marketing Association/Richard D. Irwin Distinguished Marketing Educator Award.     

Capital accumulation and regulation

This paper sets up a dynamic model that analyzes a bank's capital decision and the impact of this decision on her default risk and lending that affects aggregate output in the economy under regulation. The model shows that even though capital regulation may reduce the default risk of the bank, it may lead to credit crunch, hence the ensuing decline in output in the real sector. Furthermore, it appears that the risk-based capital requirement changes the composition of both liability and asset of the bank's balance sheet.     

Estimating global bank network connectedness

We use LASSO methods to shrink, select, and estimate the high‐dimensional network linking the publicly traded subset of the world's top 150 banks, 2003–2014. We characterize static network connectedness using full‐sample estimation and dynamic network connectedness using rolling‐window estimation. Statically, we find that global bank equity connectedness has a strong geographic component, whereas country sovereign bond connectedness does not. Dynamically, we find that equity connectedness increases during crises, with clear peaks during the Great Financial Crisis and each wave of the subsequent European Debt Crisis, and with movements coming mostly from changes in cross‐country as opposed to within‐country bank linkages.     

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WILLINGNESS OF COMPANIES TO INVEST AFTER THE FINANCIAL CRISIS? EVIDENCE FROM LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES

In this article we investigate the changes in corporate investment dynamics in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Using firm-level data from six Latin American countries from 2002 to 2015, we show that firms are less constrained and have greater ability to invest after the crisis. However, the willingness of firms to invest optimally is reduced. This is supported by strong evidence that during the postcrisis period investment–cash flow sensitivity disappears, investment-q sensitivity increases, and the estimated speeds of adjustment for target investment decrease. Moreover, after the crisis, firms notably increase their efforts to attain optimal cash and leverage levels. Our analysis implies that firms may not always be willing to invest optimally. The willingness to invest optimally appears to be time variant and moves together with the dynamics of cash and leverage policies, albeit in opposite directions.